Apatow, Kasdan and Reilly Walk Hard

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, the fictional biopic and spoof on rock stars won’t hit theaters until December, but ComingSoon.net got a sneak peek at selective footage when Columbia Pictures invited us to preview scenes from the film and talk to producer Judd Apatow, director Jake Kasdan and the star of the movie, John C. Reilly.

The comedy starts off with the crowd cheering and Reilly leaning against a wall with his head in his fists about to go on stage to perform, but before he goes does, he flashes back to his life as a child and we see the tragic accident of his brother and his father wishing it was Dewey that died instead. Sound familiar? Think Walk the Line/Johnny Cash.

In the flashback, we also see Cox at age 14 singing in a high school talent show which causes great controversy among his family and other adults in the audience. As a result, he’s kicked out of the house and runs away with his 12-year-old girlfriend (Kristen Wigg) to pursue his music career.

Another clip we were shown was the beginning of the rock star’s troubles. He married his high school sweetheart, but soon became intensely attracted to his backup singer Darlene, played by Jenna Fischer, who very much resembles June Carter Cash in the scene. They were singing “Let’s Duet” and the tension between them was hilarious as they tried not to give into the temptation. Here’s the lyrics:

Dewey Cox: Hello, Darling.Darlene: Hello, Mr. Cox.Cox: Are you ready to sing one?Darlene: I’m always ready.Cox: Alright. In my dreams you’re blowing me Some kisses.Darlene: That’s one of my favorite things to do.Cox: You and I could go down In history.Darlene: That’s what I’m planning to do with you.Together: Let’s Duet. In ways that make us feel good. Let’s Duet.Darlene: Uh! Dewey Cox, I am not that type of woman.Cox: Alright.Darlene: That doesn’t mean we can’t still be friends.Cox: Okay, then here’s to us being great friends.Darlene: I can’t. We’re friends! (Slaps Dewey in the face)Cox: I’m going to beat off All my demons.Darlene: That’s what loving Jesus ought to bring.Cox: Looking in your eyes, I start believing.Darlene: Lets bring this whisper to s shout.Together: Lets Duet. In ways that make us feel good. Put two and two together, perfect harmony. We know its only natural. Lets do it.Cox: I only want to make out What you’re saying.Darlene: Read my lips. Its what you are looking for.Cox: Here I am, sneaking up behind ya.Darlene: You can always come in my backdoor.

After the clips, Apatow, Reilly and Kasdan came out on stage and talked to us about their new film.

ComingSoon.net: Why don’t you start off by telling us how you came up with the idea for this film?

Jake Kasdan: It was just sort of a thought one night, to make a fake biopic. I called up Judd after a day or two of having that thought in my head and said, “Does this seem funny?” We then started writing it together. Within a few days, even. Just kind of coming up with rock biopic jokes. We are both big music fans. And we enjoy crazy stories about rock lore. We just started throwing things back and forth. We discovered that if you took real stories that you knew and made them five percent weirder, or even just two percent weirder, you had something that was pretty out there and pretty funny.

Judd Apatow: We started watching every single biopic we could get our hands on. We even watched the Marilyn Monroe HBO biography. Just any kind of biopic.

Kasdan: And also rock documentaries. I was watching people’s actual life stories.

Apatow: There was this great, terrible Jimi Hendrix rock biopic from Showtime that was just great. I just recommend that you hunt it down at your video store. It looks terrible. They would cut to stock footage from the ’60s. Then they would cut to him. He would be sitting in these over-lit rooms. Very early on, we thought, “If we can convince John C. Reilly to do this, this would be incredible.” So we started talking to him during the writing process.

CS: Can you guys talk about creating the soundtrack? How did that all come about?

John C. Reilly: The creation of the soundtrack? Jake can probably speak pretty elegantly about this too. But we had this great stable of songwriters. And we kind of had this friendly, open competition. We had our own web page server, and people would post their songs on there. “What do you think about this?” And, “What do you think about this?” A lot of them started coming in. The one that really knocked it out of the park was Marshal Crenshaw’s “Walk Hard.” The title song. There were a bunch of great songwriters that we worked with. Mike Viola, Dan Burn, Charlie Bottoms. Did I miss anybody?

Apatow: Mike Andrews.

Reilly: Yeah, Mike Andrews.

Kasdan: Mike Parks came in and worked on the Beach Boys psychedelic period. We asked him to make fun of himself.

Reilly: We started putting this album together more than a year ago. The cool thing about working on this movie was, I wasn’t nervous on the first day of shooting like I usually am because I felt like I’d been meditating on the character for four months while we were recording. We kind of found a lot of the tone of the movie, and a lot of the ideas as we were recording. Once we started, it was really hard to stop. We recorded thirty-five songs. It’s hard enough to make one album. But somehow, after only four months, we had thirty-five songs. Five of which were covers. But still, that was thirty original songs. I was pretty blown away by that. And it kind of gave us a tonal blueprint for the whole movie, when we started shooting it. It was easier with this music that we already had.

Kasdan: It seemed like in the beginning, the album was going to be the hardest part of this. Like there were several conversations that Judd and I had in the very beginning. We were just trying to figure out how funny the songs should be versus how good they should be. And if they could be both things at once. It was about coming up with a strategy. It’s seemed daunting to come up with an album. There was a lot of music written into the script. Titles for songs. There were specific scenes that were built around these songs. And its true. We opened it up to a whole bunch of people. And we ended up with about five people that wrote the majority of the songs. These were guys that I had actually known before. Dan Burn and Mike Viola were two of the first guys that I ever mentioned this movie to.

Apatow: Mike was the voice on “That Thing You Do!”

Kasdan: Yeah, he is the voice of John and Shep’s characters in “That Thing You Do!” And Dan has recorded a bunch of albums with his band called The Candy Britches. So he’s done a couple of albums himself. I had a feeling that both of those guys would be great contributors. Once it got going, suddenly, everybody had more ideas. It got to where we could say, “Is there any song that we haven’t thought of that we don’t have?” And we could generate them pretty fast.

Reilly: To Jake and Judd’s credit, a lot of the songs already existed in the script as concepts. A song like “Guilty as Charged.” About him taking these things he’d done in his life and how he turned them into a song. So the songwriters already had a leg up on a lot of these songs. Because they already had a song title or the feeling that a lot of these songs were supposed to convey. Rather than purely coming up with some idea. The script guided everybody.

CS: John, can you talk about your influences? Who did you study and what were you trying to convey with the voice of the character?

Reilly: The cool thing about the music in the movie is that I didn’t really have to pick one person. As the time periods move on, the guy is such a chameleon, that he goes with the times. So, when he hits the ’60s, I was looking at people like Elvis and Roy Orbison. Even a little early Johnny Cash. When it started to move out of the ’60s, I looked at Brian Wilson. As it went along, there was a new person to emulate. I have very eclectic music tastes myself. So, yeah, like they say. Every rock star wants to be an actor, and every actor wants to be a rock star. This was a dream come true for me. Just the studio part. Just recording the album in the studio was a real dream come true. Not just with the singers and the songwriters, but also with the musicians they collected. I was walking into this dream job. I’d done music in movies before. But much more limited. Usually one or two songs here or there. I mean, I think the music in this movie stands alone as a great achievement. I am really proud of the movie. But I am also really proud of the Box of Cox that we will have coming out. It will include all thirty songs.

CS: Joaquin Phoenix worked specifically with T-Bone Burnett. Did you have someone you worked with?

Reilly: Well, yeah. We just mentioned Mike Andrews as the producer of the music. He was the one that was pulling all of the levers and arranging the music. He was the one guiding the musicians, and pulling the right groups of people together for the different sounds that we needed. He was our guru. I’ll mess up if I try to name everybody. I will miss someone, so I just wont do that. But, Mike was the ringleader in the studio.

Apatow: John brings a lot of heat on his own. He can really sing.

Reilly: I was about to say that. I bring a lot of heat on my own.

Kasdan: He wasn’t like someone that had to be taught from the beginning. He knew it.

Reilly: I grew up doing musicals as a kid. And I had a lot of music in my family. So, yeah. Though, this movie made me feel like I’d been working my whole life for this moment. I didn’t know it was coming. I didn’t know it would be like this. But everything that I’ve learned before this has come into play in this movie.

CS: Jake and Judd, this might be one of the broader things you have done. Maybe since “The Ben Stiller Show.” Has it been freeing to go a little bit larger with some of the comedy?

Apatow: Yeah. I remember we used to do these U2 sketches back in 1992. Where Bono was played by Ben. And we did this very elaborate Metallica sketch. Metallica did the theme to a body-switching movie starring Fred Willard and Pauly Shore. That’s why we were cancelled. These things had some very dense levels. So, for me, as soon as Jake mentioned the idea, I thought this was going to be the most fun thing ever. My grandfather was the producer that produced the first Janis Joplin record. He did a lot of albums, and a lot of jazz. So it’s always been an arena that I have been fascinated by. I also thought it was time to make a movie where you saw a man’s penis. In a comedy. For a long time. I thought, “We already did the crowning shot What else could we do?”

Kasdan: Not to give anything away.

Apatow: Yeah, not to give anything away, there is a penis in this movie. I’m not going to obsess about how great the songs are. There is a penis.

CS: Whose penis is it? Is it a stunt penis?

Apatow: Well, that’s the surprise. It’s my penis. I have gotten a big ego, and I just thought I wanted to show it.

Reilly: One of the cool things about making this movie, and one of the great things about doing biopics, and I have been in a couple of them, is the level of production design and the attention to detail. Usually you have the epic spread of the time period. But, often times when you are on those kinds of movies, there is this almost sanctimonious feeling about it. “We have to get it right for the memory.” There is this overly serious vibe. Like, lets talk to some people. And read about them. See what they really say. The cool thing about this, you get all the bang of doing a real biopic, but you also got to have so much fun on the set every day. We got to make fun of it, yet we also got to live in all of these different time periods. And the music. I will go back to the music again. The cool thing about the music was that we didn’t set out to write bad music. Or dumb music. You very quickly learn that when you set out to write music, even if it’s meant to be funny, that you really have to put your heart in it. You have to try your very best to write a good song. It’s really hard to write one good song, let alone thirty. I really hope that comes across. Just the amount of care and love for music that went into making it. Everyone here, and behind the scenes, really has a love for the musician’s journey. We’re not just taking the piss.

Kasdan: And all of the guys in the band. Tim Meadows, Chris Parnell, and Mike Besser are all improv comics. None of them played. And they all learned all of the songs live. That required a tremendous amount of work. Tim had never played drums. But he spot-on can now. Those guys can play those songs now. They sat there and learned it. They gave it as much intensity and devotion as if they were playing any other type of character.

CS: The tone of this film is very close to the tone of “The Rutles: All You Need is Cash.”

Apatow: Oh, sure. That is one of the great ones of all time. It is very daunting to look at films like “The Rutles: All You Need is Cash” and try to make a funny movie about music. Their music is so great. All of those Eric Idle songs are powerful. They were fantastic. They hold up. That whole movie holds up. So, we were aware of that. We had a lot of conversations about how funny the songs should be. What makes me laugh is that a lot of the songs are beautiful. If you weren’t really listening to the words, you wouldn’t realize how dumb some of them are. I was listening to this song the other day. It was called Dewey Cox Died Today.

Reilly: I write my own posthumous song while I am still alive. Before I died, so that I could get it all on record correctly.

Apatow: I felt bad that it was such a dumb song. When this is over, someone should write normal lyrics for this song.

CS: Do you get nervous poking fun at a band like the Beatles?

Apatow: Do I think Yoko Ono is going to come after me?

Reilly: That has yet to be seen. If they get mad. I hope not. It was pretty hard to cast the Beatles. Should we tell the truth to the journalists? Seriously, where are you going to find someone who looks at least vaguely like them, or seems like them in sprit? And they had to be funny. They couldn’t be afraid of this daunting challenge of playing Paul McCartney or John Lennon. Then to get four of them that are available on the same day. It was an on going game every day. “Who else do we have for the Beatles? We need someone to play the Beatles. It shoots in a week.”

Apatow: And then Justin Long shows up and he has a George Harrison impression? He’s just got that in his back pocket, waiting for the call.

Reilly: And Jason Schwartzman is obsessed with Ringo. He has been making the Ringo face his whole life. Once they all got there, we were like, “Of course! This is the perfect team of people.”

CS: Were there any surprises as far as casting?

Apatow: Well, John, you can talk about our music cameos.

Reilly: Yeah. Well, another tough part to cast was Elvis. Elvis Presley has a brief walk-on. He comes off the stage just as I go on to sing that song. That was another one. You’d be amazed at what scaredy cats some of these actors are. You say, “You want to play Elvis?” And they say, “Oh, I don’t know man. That’s a lot. Everyone knows who Elvis is.” And I’m like, “So what. Why don’t you forget about all of that and come have some fun.” It turns out the only guy with balls is Jack White from the White Stripes. He showed up in the middle of a really busy schedule for him. And he was amazing. I don’t think he’d ever acted before. He was in “Cold Mountain.” He had a small part. But, he really hung with the improv. I don’t know what is actually going to end up in the movie. These guys are still toying with a couple of different versions of that scene. But we did one take where all we did was talk in what I call Tupelo Pidgeon. This weird sort of country talk, where only he and I can understand each other. We are both from the south. It sort of becomes a mix of those things right now.

Apatow: I found Jack White irritating. He is the coolest guy on earth. He is the greatest rock musician. And writer, and performer that you have ever seen. F**k him! What is that? Now he is stepping on my territory. He is so talented. It was so daunting to all of us. He can do what we do in his sleep. As an after thought.

Reilly: Through another person, I was told, “Jack was so nervous! Thank you for being so nice to him.”

Kasdan: He really couldn’t have been looser. He spent hours improvising with John. It was never the same scene twice. Which we think of as a good thing.

Apatow: And Eddie Vedder came. Dewey gets his lifetime achievement award, and Eddie does the over-the-top induction speech. That was irritating too, because Eddie nailed it on the first take. He did it perfectly.

Reilly: That’s because he lived it, dude. He already did it for real.

Apatow: He can act as well.

Kasdan: He actually inducted R.E.M. into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He can act, and he has pitch perfect comedy timing.

Apatow: And he is handsome as sh*t. He is way to good looking as well.

Reilly: I was really in awe when all of these people showed up to support our little movie. Like Jackson Brown, and Ghostface Killer, and Frank Black, and Lyle Lovett, and Frankie Muniz. Is he still in the movie? I’m not trying to be mean. Frankie really is in the movie. He came out of retirement, and took time from his racing career, to play Buddy Holly in one scene. But I don’t know if that will stay in the movie.

CS: So are you going for an R rating?

Apatow: Why? Because of the penis? Is that R?

Reilly: It’s not hard. Does that get us anything?

Apatow: An R? That basically means a little boy can look down and see it. But he is not allowed to look up and see one on the screen. I don’t understand this country.

CS: How much of a biography did you create for Dewey before writing the script?

Apatow: We are not the type of people that sit and write eighty pages of bio background. Because we are lazy. We were forced to figure it out. We had to figure out the details of his tragic yet triumphant life.

Reilly: A lot of the back story stuff we came up with in the studio, when we were recording the music. A song would remind us of something from a specific time period. We filled in a lot of blanks that way. Jake was there when we were recording a lot of the music.

CS: did you guys look at the recent spat of spoof movies for an idea of what not to do?

Apatow: I studied them. No.

CS: Some of them are so bad.

Apatow: Tell that to my ten-year-old daughter. She digs them. But, no, we didn’t. But I am a fan of the spoof movies. Some are funnier than others. The Zucker Brothers made some of the best spoof movies of all time. “Airplane!” is probably the funniest movie ever made. There has never been a movie that has gotten bigger laughs in the theater than “Airplane!” when it came out. So, I think, like all movies, there are good ones and bad ones. We just thought it would be fun to make one that wasn’t bad. This isn’t a joke for joke spoof. This movie is more making fun of the genre and the structure of the movies. And if you watch a lot of biopic movies, a lot of the scenes are the same scenes. It’s almost unavoidable. When you are telling the story of a musician, there are going to be multiple wives, and rehab, and loss of senses.

CS: So, Dewey Cox is this chameleon. Was there any genre of music that you couldn’t get in? Does Dewey have a rap career?

Kasdan: There was actually this funny sequence where Dewey is older, and semi-retired. This rap star samples “Walk Hard” and makes the filthiest song you have ever heard. And that rapper’s name is Lil’ Nutsack. That song is really dirty. We asked this guy to write us a dirty rap incorporating the lyrics from “Walk Hard.” And man, it is really filthy.

Apatow: Look at me. I’m embarrassed. I don’t even like that it’s on my computer at home.

Kasdan: What’s funny is, when we were shooting that scene, everyone was referring to him as Nutsack. That’s the way it was written in the script. We got a memo from the legal department saying that we couldn’t call him Nutsack because there are four other rappers named Nutsack. So you have to change his name. So we changed it to Lil’ Nutsack. Which is fine. There were four different spellings of Nutsack.